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On Sept. 8, 2018, #RiseforClimate encouraged people around the world to demonstrate their concern over inaction on climate change. The demonstrators urged governments and others to do what needs to be done if we are to avoid a catastrophic climate future.

The response was mostly a shrug from anyone who noticed. A 15-year-old girl in Sweden started her own strike on Fridays against the inaction of the Swedish government. Yawn — though she got some media coverage because of the novelty.

Protests against the Trans Mountain pipeline, Line 3 and Keystone XL continued to pop up, with small numbers and little money. It was nothing that a few slick (taxpayer-funded) ad campaigns from Alberta or executive orders from U.S. President Donald Trump could not counter. Double yawn — though there was some brief consternation when Elizabeth May, leader of the federal Green party, was arrested and charged.

When the Wet’suwet’en checkpoint in British Columbia was overrun by RCMP — more considerately, it seems, than how Indigenous land protectors are treated in other countries — Winnipeg was on the list of cities across Canada in which protests were staged afterward in support.

Portage and Main, and during rush hour, no less. That made some people notice. Fewer noticed the kids who joined the global student climate strike the next day and took their protests to the steps of the legislature.

If you are still shrugging or yawning, you might want to rethink your attitude. You can move a mountain by carrying away small stones.

When the fossil-fuel divestment protest movement began, it was ignored, too. Yet the campaign is now global and growing by leaps and bounds. The Irish government just followed through on its promise to sell off its investments in fossil-fuel companies. Churches, municipalities and universities have done the same.

Shamefully, this has not happened here. We should not fund our educational institutions, our communities or our pensions by investing in the very industries that make a livable future impossible.

But as the climate heats up, if our institutions really represent the Canadian public, when will their voices be heard?

As Canadians, we believe in the rule of law, what Abraham Lincoln described as “government of the people, by the people, for the people” in his Gettysburg Address. Setting aside the irony that these words were said by a Republican president who demonstrated eloquence, wisdom and strong moral character, I am afraid that the small things happening today could also add up to big trouble down the road.

Canada has a mostly peaceful history, in comparison to the violence, upheaval and deprivation that led so many people from other places to settle here over the past 400 years.

If we were not so peaceful, and if we did not agree to that “rule of law,” however, there would be no good alternative. In fact, there are not enough armed combat troops in the whole of the Canadian Armed Forces to control or suppress an active insurgency just in the city of Winnipeg.

We agree to the rule of law because we believe it is for our collective good, whether we agree with that law all the time or not. But as protests spread, as the idea of government for the people is undermined or overturned by riot squads, it starts to look as if we are being governed by and for elite groups in our society instead.

There are dangerous currents in our lives together these days, currents that we ignore at our peril. A few years ago, the #Occupy movement waxed and waned. It gave us the language of “the one per cent,” the elites who have most of the wealth, and the 99 per cent, who have hope, democracy and the rule of law on their side, at least in places like Canada, but nothing much else.

Over the next two years, provincial and federal political campaigns will appeal not to our better nature, but to our worst. They will play on our fears and anxieties. They will not deal with the mountains that need to be moved.

So when the government talks peace and reconciliation, but then sends in the police; when we are told to obey the law, but the government refuses; when the government buys and builds pipelines instead of finding another, more sustainable way, there is trouble ahead.

When real steps toward a sustainable future are dismissed as impractical or inconvenient, all we can do is carry away one small stone at a time. Each of us.

One way or other, we will move that mountain. Someday, we will have a just and sustainable society.

Whether it resembles the Canada we know today depends on whether our government really is for the people, or not.

When 15-year-old Greta Thunberg from Sweden stepped up to the podium at COP24 in Katowice, Poland, the room was virtually empty of delegates, at the end of a long day of negotiations.

This is what usually happens when civil society representatives try to speak at UN conferences. Time slots for them are only available when member states have nothing more to say, long after delegates have stopped paying attention or have gone home.

Social media, however, gives public attention to these speakers that governments choose to ignore. Those few minutes of global airtime are worth waiting in line for, arguing for a place at the microphone.

So more and more people are hearing Greta’s words, just as they learned later about her boycott of school on Fridays to protest her own government’s inaction on climate change.

“You are not mature enough to tell it like it is,” she informed adults everywhere. “You say you love your children above all else. And yet you’re stealing their future in front of their very eyes.”

Certainly it is future generations that will suffer most for the cowardice, greed and indecision of this one. For Greta, it is about equity: “It is the sufferings of the many which pay for the luxuries of the few.”

As she said, “You have run out of excuses and we are running out of time.”

These are tough words to hear, if you choose to listen. Truth-telling is rarely popular, but we cannot begin to respond to the crisis hanging over our heads without preferring truth to popularity.

This is why, of course, governments would rather avoid such a conversation. The COP24 negotiations were (literally) undermined by coal miners beneath the ground around them in Katowice, whose work is promoted by governments that rely on fossil fuels to fund their delusions.

Back home, we have been treated recently to a series of television ads from the Alberta government and the Trans Mountain Pipeline — more taxpayer dollars at work. The ads are trying to persuade us of the economic importance of pipelines like the ones our Liberal federal government has bought with more of our money.

Promoting pipelines as the way to create a prosperous, green future is like promoting drunk driving because it will generate much-needed jobs in the funeral and automobile repair industries.

Encouraging fossil fuel consumption instead of reducing greenhouse gas emissions literally means that people paying into the pension plans used to fund these pipelines won’t live long enough to collect on their investment — that is, if climate change doesn’t cause a global economic collapse first.

I wonder what will happen to the economy, for example, when younger generations realize it makes no sense to work and save for a retirement life that a warming world will make impossible?

So the thousands of small victories applauded in the COP24 negotiations need to be set against the large victories that were required. Hope is in short supply, because (as Greta said), we are relying for answers on the same system that got us into this mess in the first place. If the system won’t work, then we need to change it — and soon.

Climate change is the defining problem of our generation. It is a crisis, one that can be faced and met, but only if we act like it is a crisis and not just some political football to punt around the field. As we enjoy a warm and dry December, for example, I worry what this will mean for Manitoba forests and rural communities next summer.

A year ago, I said that the Pallister government’s failure to do anything substantive about the environment would be the defining issue in the 2020 provincial election. I stand by that.

A vote for a party that does nothing for the planet (as Greta would say bluntly) is a vote against your own children’s future.

Staying in bed (like the 40 per cent of Manitobans who did not vote last time) is even worse, because it clearly shows that you don’t care about those children. Or anyone else, either.

My opinion will not be popular, but that doesn’t matter to me. We need a coalition for the planet, and political parties mature enough to find a way to work together because that is the only way for a democracy to manage this crisis in time. It’s still possible, but only if wisdom and humility replace ignorance and arrogance.

Or else.

As Greta concluded her short speech, “We did not come here to beg world leaders to care. You have ignored us in the past and you will ignore us again… We have come here to let you know that change is coming, whether you like it or not. The real power belongs to the people.”

As the snow starts to fly, the “boys of summer” are done, the Jets are flying and the last frozen footballs are about to be thrown in the CFL.

Looking at a rapidly warming world (remember that 12-year time limit?) we should be debating what parts of our lifestyle — and our society — should be changed, surrendered or eliminated altogether if we want to survive.

However long your list might be, chances are “getting rid of professional sports” will not be found there, even though it should be.

Certain sectors seem to be exempt from reality these days. The top two would be professional sports and tourism.

I like watching a good game, even if seeing it in person is way out of my price range. But in a world of choices, where we have to start counting our carbon like average Canadians should be counting their calories, it is hard to justify the costs.

In the NHL, there are 31 teams, playing 82 regular-season games… before the playoffs add on even more. I wonder what the NHL’s carbon footprint might be? And yet, is any minimal effort made to mitigate that, like having teams play a double-header before flying off to their next game somewhere else? Shortening the regular season?

Nope. We won’t even talk about the carbon costs of playing hockey in semi-tropical climates — the wildfires in California routinely overlap with the hockey seasons of the Los Angeles Kings and the Anaheim Ducks.

We won’t even mention the Arizona Coyotes, the Vegas Golden Knights or the Florida Panthers. Hockey has little to do with winter sports anymore. It’s about the money, honey.

Add in the NBA, the NFL — and baseball in season — and you get my point. It’s not just team travel, either, but all the thousands of fans burning up carbon to attend the games.

In the United States, consider how much more greenhouse gas gets added on for college and university sports, even if we allowed kids in the regular school system a free pass on that carbon counter.

It’s also not about getting exercise. People are watching the game, not playing it. Other sports are the same. Imagine a golf course where everyone walked instead of using a power cart.

Speaking of golf courses, perhaps we should call the problem “the Mar-a-Lago Effect.” In other words, “I don’t need to change how I am living or what I am doing, because money and power will insulate me from whatever bad things might happen in a politically destabilized, climate-changing and warming world.”

It’s a free pass for business as usual, for the arrogant one per cent. As for the rest of us? If we have bread and circuses, as the Romans used to say, they figure we won’t notice what else is going on.

In Ontario, Premier Doug Ford has changed that slogan to beer and circuses in the Ontario legislature. In Manitoba, Premier Brian Pallister has focused on pot and playoffs, no doubt hoping we will be too stoned or distracted to notice the only green in his Made-in-Manitoba Climate and Green Plan is lake algae.

Similarly, in a world full of oxymorons, one of the worst has to be “green tourism.” The only thing green about tourism is the money other people make from those tourists, while the locals are left to clean up the mess.

Tourists are people who pay to live somewhere else in ways they could never afford to live at home. Visiting an area with a water shortage? Flush and shower away. Power supply unreliable? Not in the resort area — leave the lights on and crank the AC. Hungry people, living in the squalor of abject poverty? “Waiter, call the manager. There’s not enough selection on the dinner buffet.”

For tourists, it’s a chance (even for a week) to experience the Mar-a-Lago Effect, until the credit card is maxed or the visa expires and they return to grey reality back home.

Perhaps that’s the problem. Professional sports and tourism sell us a dream, whether it is about heroism, winning or luxury. We seeming willing to pay a lot for that dream, even if we know it will be over Monday morning.

In a climate-changing world, that dream is no longer just a harmless fantasy. It is a delusion we can no longer afford.

Whatever the frothing of the trolls in response to statements like this, common sense tells us that time marches on. A minute wasted never comes back to be better spent tomorrow.

While we cheer and jeer, constructing beer snakes instead of composters, it doesn’t matter which team wins the game. If nothing changes, we will all lose, together, and soon.